The greatest dichotomy of them all?

The thing is, this world will never be enough. The more we see of Jesus, the more we see His glory, the more we'll realise that this world will never be enough.
The more we see and taste of our ultimate fulfillment, which, THANK GOD is real and tangible and on its way, the less we'll feel fulfilled in this life...
The only answer, the only way to deal with this, to live in this paradox, is to focus on Jesus. Always. He is our answer, our righteousness, our fulfillment, He is our all. He is awesome.

What makes Good News good? Part four

Continuing thoughts on John Piper's sermon 'What makes the Good News good?'
God uses people to bring His light to others.
Acts 26:17-18

At the end of the last section we were left with an apparent contradiction. If God alone can take away the darkness and shine light, what is our role in evangelism? Why are we told to Go! at the end of Matthew? In Acts 16:17-18 Paul says that he has been sent to the gentiles to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God. So it seems that God uses human messengers to do what only He can do.
I have never come away from sharing the gospel with someone feeling like a did a good job. I've always felt like i've put my foot in it somehow, or said the wrong thing, or not enough, or too much. I feel helpless. And i am. But God has appointed us as agents of His message, so we must therefore go with confidence that every authority on Heaven and Earth has been given to Him. Every authority. So we have nothing to fear. This is why 2 Corinthians 4:7 comes right after 4:6. Because its true. We are weak, we are, on our own, as useless as a broken clay pot. And yet, inside us we have an uncountable and insurmountable treasure. The light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The sweetest and best light there is.
Yes, only God can replace darkness with light. But yes, we have a responsibility to be His messengers, to go and tell people. This is why we are like clay pots. Because God wants all the glory due His name. God makes it so that we have to rely on Him in evangelism, in the business of helping people see His light because that's how it should be. Only God has the power to take away the darkness, and so He should be treated and revered as such. God wants the glory. Acts 26:17-18 tell us that we must be part of this, that we have to tell people, that we have a part to play in opening people's eyes. And what an honour it is to play that part, to be with people as their eyes open for the first time.
So what role do we have to play as messengers? That question is what Piper deals with next.

RUCU Committee 06/07

A top photo of top people!
Shame only one of them's got a blog...

What makes Good News good? Part three

Continuing thought on John Piper's sermon 'What makes the Good News good?'
God Alone gives light and takes blindness.
2 Cor 4:6

There's a link between this verse (2 Cor 4:6) and Genesis 1. Both times God gives light. In Genesis God speaks light into nothingness. God commands and nothingness obeys. There is hope here. At beggining of time God spoke into darkness and there was light...so why not into people's hearts? In fact, not just 'why not' but this is the only way that people will be saved. The only way. There was darkness in our hearts before we were saved, just as there was darkness in the world. 2 Corinthians 4:6 makes the link between the darkness in people's hearts and the darkness in the world. If you are a Christian you were saved. This was an event that happened, God shone His light into out hearts. Where there was dark: light, where there was blindness:
vision, where there was lostness: foundness (?!).
He shone His light into our hearts by His grace and mercy. No Christian thinks he saved himself. Blind people can not make themselves see, dead people can not become alive under their own steam. No. God is the only one who can shine light into our dark hearts, into anyone's dark hearts. He saved us, He shone His light when we were in total rebellion to Him and His ways. What an awesome, merciful, gracious God! Salvation comes when God speaks light into our hearts. Salvation comes when we see the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. When we see that Jesus is God.
Thats why lostness is blindness to glory.

What makes Good News good? Part two

Lostness is blindness to glory.
Continuing thoughts on 'What makes the Good News good', sermon by John Piper.
2 Cor 4:4.

What does it mean to be lost? Lost people are people blind to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That's how we get saved, when God graciously shines His glory in the face of Jesus Christ into our hearts and minds. When we see that glory we are saved, so it follows that people are lost when they don't see that glory. Everyone knows people like that, and later on in this sermon Piper comes back to how to deal with that. But for now, we look at the story of Jesus taking a child into His arms. Jesus picks this kid up and tells His disciples that whoever receives Him like He received the child receives the Father also. That we must be like children. And this is our God. HE OWNS THE WORLD, HE HOLDS IT UP BY HIS WORD., and yet he is like like this with children. And you tell people this, and we try and we try, and we show Jesus to them in all His glory, and, as Piper puts it, they look at us like we're talking Swahili. Nothing. To be lost is to be blind to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we were like this once. So lets not scoff or belittle people who don't believe. It is only by God's immense grace and mercy that we believe. Lets hope and yearn and long and suffer that they might be unblinded. How? How will they be able to see? How will they cease to be blind?
Piper deals with this next.

What makes Good News good? Part one

So last Friday I mentioned how i'd listened to this sermon, and how much of God's glory in the Gospel i'd heard through it. I'm going to try now to blog some thoughts on it, broken up into five chunks, as Piper preached it.

Disclaimer: everything that Piper said was, i believe, gold. Any heresy or half truth you read in the following post is totally of my own making.

What is the highest, best, final good of the Good News?
2 Cor 3:17-4:7
Gospel means good news. But why? What is the good part of the Good News? Is it justification by faith? That's pretty cool, pretty good news. Something we could never earn given to us because of our faith, that we are counted as part of the promise to Abraham because of our faith. Or maybe forgiveness or the removal of God's wrath against us? You'd have to admit that's good news? Sure. But the best, final 'good'? Salvation from Hell? Eternal life in Heaven? All these things are good. All of them are wonderful Gospel truths. But are they the ultimate good of the Good News? Or do they simply point us toward something else? Some better, higher good? Man, there's a lot of questions there eh?

Well, i think that it makes sense to say that surely there is something good, beyond those pieces of good news that makes them good. That is to say, that those things are means to an end, and the end is the only thing that makes sense of the means.

Piper then takes us to 2 Cor 4:4 and 6 for the answer. There are several parallels between these two verses that seem to paint for us a picture of the ultimate good of the Good News. The first one of these is the mention of light in both verse, light in verse 4 corresponds with light in verse 6. The second is knowledge and gospel. This is why we must teach, why we must proclaim. Without teaching there will be no knowledge, without knowledge of the Gospel, how will anyone be saved? The third is the glory of Christ, and the glory of God. So the Gospel, knowing the Gospel, hearing it, learning it enables us to see the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. Isn't that great! That's what the gospel does...helps us to see God in the face of Jesus. That's when people get saved, when they see that glory in the face of Christ, when they see that He reflects the glory of the Father. Isn't that great? And that's what we have. Talk about treasure in jars of clay!

So how does this fit in with the earlier claim that the Good News of the Gospel is something else other than justification or forgiveness or anything else one might care to mention. Because the glory of God satisfies us. Nothing else. We were made for a perfect relationship with Him. Unless we are justified, we can not see the glory of God in Heaven which will satisfy us forever. Unless God's wrath is removed, we will not be able to enter that perfect relationship with Him for which we were created. Jesus will satisfy all our desires. He will fill our every hole when we see Him on glory. But the only way we will see Him in glory is if we are forgiven, and justified. That's why Christ had to die, to give us the best thing he possibly could...HIMSELF! Without the good things mentioned earlier we would never be able to come into a relationship with Him, and without Him at the end of them, nothing of the other good things would make sense. Heaven isn't just a continuation of life on earth with no end. It's not just a place for Christians to hang out. John 17:3 tells us that eternal life is knowing Christ. So it would make no sense for Christ to die for anything else except for the gift of Himself.

And that is what i believe makes the Good News good. That because of our forgiveness etc we can have an eternal relationship seeing and savouring Christ, and that Christs gift of Himself is the only logical conclusion to the other great gifts of the Cross.

The good the bad and the utterly glorious

It struck me tonight at Church Cell, that one of the lies the enemy tells us to get at us is pretty pathetic really. He tells us we're not good enough. He makes us look at our sins, our way of life, our thought pattern and tells us, nudges us, that we are not good enough to be a Christian.
Well here's a thing. He's absolutly right. The cross tells us that eh? The cross is surely all the we need to see that we will never be good enough for a restored relationship with the Father, but that in the same breath that its not about being good enough. If any of us could be good enough, if any of us could be justified by the law, if we could redeem ourselves in any way, God would not have sent His son to die on the cross. Jesus would not have claimed to be the only way to heaven. Because the cross would be unneccesary and Jesus' claims of exclusivity would be untrue.

But our pride condemns us. Our pride, ably pushed on by the Devils tells us we won't and can;t be good enough, and that we should just give up. But the cross tells us something different. The cross tells us that we won't and can't be 'good enough', so come to Jesus and receive new life. Which do you prefer.

It confounds me when some Christians complain about hearing 'another sermon on the cross'...why would you ever want to hear or speak on anything else? The cross is where it all begins and ends. Sure, there are other things that are good to be taught on, to feed on and glorify God for, but none of those things work unless viewed through a cross shaped prism. I think Michael Ramsden summed it up for me perfectly at the pre mission 2005 meeting when he said something along the lines of 'on monday i'll be talking on love, and we'll go to the cross from there, on tuesday i'll be talking about hope, and we'll go to the cross from there, on wednesday the future, and we'll go to the cross from there etc'. Top!

So keep your eyes looking at the cross, and look at everything else through those cross shaped glasses. It really is all we've got, as soon as we lose our cross focus, we're in a lot of trouble...

Psalm 3:5

I lay down and slept;
i woke up again for the Lord sustained me

I've been very taken with this verse since Joe sent it to me in a text the other week.It's simple, short and sweet, but i think it tells us a lot about our God, and i just want to reflect on that.

1) 'I lay down and slept'. We need to sleep, even David, when he's on the run from Absalom, presumeably fearing for his life, he still needed to sleep. We can't do it all by ourselves, we can't even sustains ourselves for very much time, let alone a lifetime or an eternity, we need someone who can.

2) 'The Lord sustained me'. Who can sustain us? The Lord. Now, that might seem fairly obvious, but why should He sustain us? God can not bear to be near our sin, He hates it with an all consuming fire, with a holy passion, with feelings that we can not understand and with a hatred that would destroy us in an instance if we came into contact with it. And yet, 'the Lord sustained me'. David can write these words knowing their true. Knowing that the Lord has sustained him through the night. So why? Because of His great love and mercy. Because of His concern for His glory. Something especially evident in David. If the Lord hadn't sustained him through that particular night, or indeed any night, the promise He made to Abraham would be under serious threat. But our God doesn't break His promises, He can't, He won't. But then, what is man that the Lord is mindful of him. Lets take a second to look at that. It says in Colossians 1:17 that 'in Him, all things hold together'. All things. All things. The millions of chemical reactions needed to get the suns heat from the depths of space to us. About 400,000,000 tonnes of hydrogen are being turned into helium every single second in our sun. 400,000,000 tonnes! Every second! And ours isn't the only big star in the universe! And yet He chooses to sustain us through the night! Wow...what an amazing God we worship!

3) Genesis 2:2 tells us that when He had finished creation, God rested. Hebrews 4:1-6 tells us that entering this rest is the point of our salvation. Entering into rest with God, on the seventh day which never ended. But God never sleeps. We need sleep because we are not God, but God, who is working far harder than anyone never sleeps, is omnipresent and omnipotent. So He will always sustain us in times of trouble, times which David was going through when He wrote this. While David slept the Lord kept a watchful and protective eye over him, confounding his enemies and keeping His servant safe. So, not only will God sustain me tonight, on a level which i need it when i sleep safe in my warm, lovely double bed in Reading, He will also sustain those who are under attack, who are not safe or warm. I don't think David is talking about simple nutritional sustainment here, as much as the protection he needed to be sustained from his enemies during the night. So as God sustains the billions of chemical reactions needed to get the universe through another day, so also He will sustain those who are in peril, those who are under attack for His name, and those who love Him but tonight, for the time being are neither of those things.

What a wonderful, powerful, loving God we worship. What an assurance that is. Praise the LORD!

Friday night doesn't get any better

Work done, room tidied, phone off, msn on busy...John Piper on audio

Please listen to this sermon. It's nearly three quarters of an hour but it'll fly by. I've never heard someone so consumed, so eaten up by a passion for God's glory. It nearly bought me to tears, it had be punching in the air, but most of all it had me praising God for His power and awe...

I've got a copy of John Piper's 'God is the Gospel', which is the book based on this sermon. It's not doing much good sitting on my shelf so if you want to read it, let me know.

And the beat goes on

Ceryn's made us wait for her latest post, but it's sure been worth it.

Read me.